"This wonder which my soul hath found,
This heart of music in the might of sound,
Shall forthwith be the share of all our race,
And like the morning gladden common space:
The song shall spread and swell as rivers do,
And I will teach our youth with skill to woo
This living lyre, to know its secret will;
Its fine division of the good and ill.
So shall men call me sire of harmony,
And where great Song is, there my life shall be."
Thus glorying as a god beneficent,
Forth from his solitary joy he went
To bless mankind.George Eliot
New voices come to me where'er I roam,
My heart too widens with its widening home:
But song grows weaker, and the heart must break
For lack of voice, or fingers that can wake
The lyre's full answer; nay, its chords were all
Too few to meet the growing spirit's call.
The former songs seem little, yet no more
Can soul, hand, voice, with interchanging lore
Tell what the earth is saying unto me:
The secret is too great, I hear confusedly.George Eliot
The best part of being a songwriter — beyond being able to make a living at it — is what I call the "heart payment" of a song. That's when somebody comes up after a concert and says, "My mom was a single mom, and 'You And Me Against The World' was a really important song to us." Or "We got married to 'We've Only Just Begun'" or 'Evergreen.' Or "'I Won't Last A Day Without You' got me through some hard times.'" That's heart payment for a songwriter.
Paul Williams
[On 2 Live Crew] One song was 'Suck My Dick'. Not please. Not honey, do you have a minute? 'Suck My Dick'. Like soomething the Beatles coulda rolled out. "Hey, Jean, would you like to write 'Suck My Dick'?" "Well, I don't know, do we have time? Sounds like such a hard song to write." That was the song! 'Suck My Dick'! F**kin' album sold two million records with a song called "Suck My Dick"! Like the guy got up one morning and went, "you know, today I wanna write a song. Today I want to write a love song. I want to write a song that tells how a woman and a man feel when they meet each other for the first time and they fall in love; I want to put into words feelings that men have always had, but they've never been able to express. All right, I think I'll call this song..." [Pauses, then the audience yells "Suck My Dick"] Yeah. It's that song that's gonna be on that f**kin' Golden Oldie rap album in ten years... "Where were you when you heard 'Suck My Dick?'" Remember those old days?
Sam Kinison
Ever since I was a little boy, I would study composition. And it was Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky that influenced me the most. If you take an album like Nutcracker Suite, every song is killer, every one. So I said to myself, 'Why can't there be a pop album where every...' — People used to do an album where you'd get one good song, and the rest were like B-sides, they'd call them "album songs" — and I'd say to myself 'Why can't every one be like a hit song? Why can't every song be so great that people would want to buy it if you could release it as a single?. So I always tried to strive for that. That was the purpose for the next album.
Michael Jackson
So is the song of life being sung/ By us and by all the living beings/ A melodious and harmonious song,/ Where the singer loses her own self/ And absorbs in the wonderful harmony of the song!/ An almost ecstatic experience.
Kuruvilla Pandikattu
Eliot, George
Eliot, Thomas Stearns (T. S.)
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